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Speaker-Actor Discusses Upcoming Portrayal of Abraham Lincoln on February 9

February 08, 2010

Saint Leo University’s
Distinguished Speaker Series takes a theatrical turn this month as
the main campus welcomes historian Jim Getty in his portrayal of
our sixteenth president. Getty began his career as a teacher, but
changed course when several people commented that he bears as
resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. Drawing on some earlier theater
background and his own historical research, Getty began developing
one-man shows appearing as Lincoln. Getty varies the presentations
according to the ages, interests and needs of his audiences. Getty
discussed his upcoming visit to Saint Leo in a telephone interview
from his home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he performs during
tourist season. His appearance at Saint Leo, “A Visit with Abraham
Lincoln,” is scheduled for 7 p.m., Tuesday, February 9, in the
Student Community Center. That falls just three days before the
February 12 anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, and neatly coincides
with a political science course underway at the main campus on the
Lincoln Administration.

Question: The theme of our speaker series this year is social
justice. Can you comment on Lincoln in that context?

Answer: Nothing could be more on the plate of social justice
than Abraham Lincoln. It was the slavery issue that made him go
into national politics. Had there not been slavery, he would not
have run for president. He was a state politician. He served in the
Illinois Legislature four terms. And he served one term as a
congressman from Illinois. Then he came along as a national figure
in 1854 when he stood against the expansion of slavery into the
federal territories, knowing the Constitution protected slavery
where it was already established. As president, he had economic
interests to accomplish: he was pro-banking and high-tariff. The
Department of Agriculture and the transcontinental railroad started
during his administration.

Q: Some of the Honors Program students are planning a theatrical
rally, a pro-Lincoln march on campus shortly before your talk
begins. They’ll have railroad ties and signs and are half-jokingly
calling it the first or the only rally for Lincoln in Florida. What
do you think of that?

A: Is that correct? I’ll bet it’s one more rally than they
actually had. He certainly didn’t get votes there There were 33
states in 1860, 10 in the South. They would not even list him on
the presidential ballot. Then Florida seceded from the union on
January 10, 1861.

Q: And we think politics is divisive now. Is that inaccurate,
historically?

A: It repeats itself. In the 1850s, they said senators and
congressmen had pistols in their desks in Washington. It was pretty
much a ticking time bomb.

Q: How do you view the current comparisons between Lincoln and
President Barack Obama?

A: I think that’s a mixed bag. It was easy for Obama to make that
claim, coming out of Illinois. But there is a 180-degree difference
in their view of government. Lincoln would never have had big
government doing everything. But it was good to talk about Lincoln.
It takes us back to the reasons we used black troops during the
Civil War. One of the reasons was that if everybody saw black men
fighting, they would know that black soldiers should also have
citizenship and the right to vote. And eventually, from there, the
standing to run for office. It’s a natural progression.

Q: What do you do to make your voice sound like Lincoln’s?

A: We don’t have any electronic recordings, so I have learned from
the way his contemporaries wrote about his voice inflections, and
phrases he liked to use. His “g”s were gone from the “ing” endings
of words, like “meetin’ ” instead of “meeting.” And I tried to go
listen to a lot of the old-timers in farm country in central
Illinois when I speak to get the inflection right. But we don’t
absolutely know that it is right.